One thing this really highlights to me is how often the "boring" takes end up being the most accurate. The provocative, high-energy threads are usually the ones that age the worst.
If an LLM were acting as a kind of historian revisiting today’s debates with future context, I’d bet it would see the same pattern again and again: the sober, incremental claims quietly hold up, while the hyperconfident ones collapse.
Something like "Lithium-ion battery pack prices fall to $108/kWh" is classic cost-curve progress. Boring, steady, and historically extremely reliable over long horizons. Probably one of the most likely headlines today to age correctly, even if it gets little attention.
On the flip side, stuff like "New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care" feels like high-risk framing. Benchmarks rotate constantly, and “struggle” headlines almost always age badly as models jump whole generations.
I bet theres many "boring but right" takes we overlook today and I wondr if there's a practical way to surface them before hindsight does
"Boring but right" generally means that this prediction is already priced in to our current understanding of the world though. Anyone can reliably predict "the sun will rise tomorrow", but I'm not giving them high marks for that.
I'm giving them higher marks than the people who say it won't.
LLMs have seen huge improvements over the last 3 years. Are you going to make the bet that they will continue to make similarly huge improvements, taking them well past human ability, or do you think they'll plateau?
right, because if there is one thing that history shows us again and again is that things that have a period of huge improvements never plateau but instead continue improving to infinity.
Improvement to infinity, that is the sober and wise bet!
The prediction that a new technology that is being heavily researched plateaus after just 5 years of development is certainly a daring one. I can’t think of an example from history where that happened.
Claiming that AI in anything resembling its current form is older than 5 years is like claiming the history of the combustion engine started when an ape picked up a burning stick.
Your analogy fails because picking up a burning stick isn’t a combustion engine, whereas decades of neural-net and sequence-model work directly enabled modern LLMs. LLMs aren’t “five years old”; the scaling-transformer regime is. The components are old, the emergent-capability configuration is new.
Treating the age of the lineage as evidence of future growth is equivocation across paradigms. Technologies plateau when their governing paradigm saturates, not when the calendar says they should continue. Supersonic flight stalled immediately, fusion has stalled for seventy years, and neither cared about “time invested.”
Early exponential curves routinely flatten: solar cells, battery density, CPU clocks, hard-disk areal density. The only question that matters is whether this paradigm shows signs of saturation, not how long it has existed.
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You joke, but, alas, there is a _real_ company kinda trying to do this. Reflect Orbital[1] wants to set up space mirrors, so you can have daytime at night for your solar panels! (Various issues, like around light pollution and the fact that looking up at the proposed satellites with binoculars could cause eye damage... don't seem to be on their roadmap.) This is one idea that's going to age badly whether or not they actually launch anything, I suspect.
Battery tech is too boring, but seems more likely to manage long-term effectiveness.
Reflecting sunlight from orbit is an idea that had been talked about for a couple of decades even before Znamya-2[1] launched in 1992. The materials science needed to unfurl large surfaces in space seems to be very difficult, whether mirrors or sails.
A lot of the press likes to paint “AI” as a uniform field that continues to improve together. But really it’s a bunch of related subfields. Once in a blue moon a technique from one subfield crosses over into another.
“AI” can play chess at superhuman skill. “AI” can also drive a car. That doesn’t mean Waymo gets safer when we increase Stockfish’s elo by 10 points.
They're already better than you at reciting historical facts. I'd guess they're probably better at composing poems (they're not great but far better than the average person).
Or you agree with me? I'm not looking for prescience marks, I'm just less convinced that people really make the more boring and obvious predictions.
What is an intellectual task? Once again, there's tons of stuff LLMs won't be trained on in the next 3 years. So it would be trivial to just find one of those things and say voila! LLMs aren't better than me at that.
I'll make one prediction that I think will hold up. No LLM-based system will be able to take a generic ask like "hack the nytimes website and retrieve emails and password hashes of all user accounts" and do better than the best hackers and penetration testers in the world, despite having plenty of training data to go off of. It requires out-of-band thinking that they just don't possess.
I'll take a stab at this: LLMs currently seem to be rather good at details, but they seem to struggle greatly with the overall picture, in every subject.
- If I want Claude Code to write some specific code, it often handles the task admirably, but if I'm not sure what should be written, consulting Claude takes a lot of time and doesn't yield much insight, where as 2 minutes with a human is 100x more valuable.
- I asked ChatGPT about some political event. It mirrored the mainstream press. After I reminded it of some obvious facts that revealed a mainstream bias, it agreed with me that its initial answer was wrong.
These experiences and others serve to remind me that current LLMs are mostly just advanced search engines. They work especially well on code because there is a lot of reasonably good code (and tutorials) out there to train on. LLMs are a lot less effective on intellectual tasks that humans haven't already written and published about.
To be clear, you are suggesting “huge improvements” in “every intellectual task”?
This is unlikely for the trivial reason that some tasks are roughly saturated. Modest improvements in chess playing ability are likely. Huge improvements probably not. Even more so for arithmetic. We pretty much have that handled.
But the more substantive issue is that intellectual tasks are not all interconnected. Getting significantly better at drawing hands doesn’t usually translate to executive planning or information retrieval.
Sorry, I now realize this thread is about whether LLMs can improve on tasks and not whether AI can. Agreed there’s a lot of headroom for LLMs, less so for AI as a whole.
> They're already better than you at reciting historical facts.
They're better at regurgitating historical facts than me because they were trained on historical facts written by many humans other than me who knew a lot more historical facts. None of those facts came from an LLM. Every historical fact that isn't entirely LLM generated nonsense came from a human. It's the humans that were intelligent, not the fancy autocomplete.
Now that LLMs have consumed the bulk of humanity's written knowledge on history what's left for it to suck up will be mainly its own slop. Exactly because LLMs are not even a little bit intelligent they will regurgitate that slop with exactly as much ignorance as to what any of it means as when it was human generated facts, and they'll still spew it back out with all the confidence they've been programed to emulate. I predict that the resulting output will increasingly shatter the illusion of intelligence you've so thoroughly fallen for so far.
> At what? They're already better than me at reciting historical facts.
I wonder what happens if you ask deepseek about Tiananmen Square…
Edit: my “subtle” point was, we already know LLMs censor history. Trusting them to honestly recite historical facts is how history dies. “The victor writes history” has never been more true. Terrifying.
Surely you meant the latter? The boring option follows previous experience. No technology has ever not reached a plateau, except for evolution itself I suppose, till we nuke the planet.
LLMs aren't getting better that fast. I think a linear prediction says they'd need quite a while to maybe get "well past human ability", and if you incorporate the increases in training difficulty the timescale stretches wide.
Prediction markets have pretty much obviated the need for these things. Rather than rely on "was that really a hot take?" you have a market system that rewards those with accurate hot takes. The massive fees and lock-up period discourage low-return bets.
FWIW Polymarket (which is one of the big markets) has no lock-up period and, for now while they're burning VC coins, no fees. Otherwise agree with your point though.
As opposed to the current world of brigading social media threads to make consensus look like it goes your way and then getting journalists scraping by on covering clickbait to cover your brigading as fact?
The one about LLMs and mental health is not a prediction but a current news report, the way you phrased it.
Also, the boring consistent progress case for AI plays out in the end of humans as viable economic agents requiring a complete reordering of our economic and political systems in the near future. So the “boring but right” prediction today is completely terrifying.
“Boring” predictions usually state that things will continue to work the way they do right now. Which is trivially correct, except in cases where it catastrophically isn’t.
So the correctness of boring predictions is unsurprising, but also quite useless, because predicting the future is precisely about predicting those events which don’t follow that pattern.
This suggests that the best way to grade predictions is some sort of weighting of how unlikely they were at the time. Like, if you were to open a prediction market for statement X, some sort of grade of the delta between your confidence of the event and the “expected” value, summed over all your predictions.
Exactly, that's the element that is missing. If there are 50 comments against and one pro and that pro has it in the longer term then that is worth noticing, not when there are 50 comments pro and you were one of the 'pros'.
Going against the grain and turning out right is far more valuable than being right consistently when the crowd is with you already.
Yeah a simple of total points of pro comments vs total points of con comments may be simple and exact enough to simulate a prediction market. I don't know if it can be included in the prompt or better to be vibecoded in directly.
It's because algorithmic feeds based on "user engagement" rewards antagonism. If your goal is to get eyes on content, being boring, predictable and nuanced is a sure way to get lost in the ever increasing noise.
Is this why depressed people often end up making the best predictions?
In personal situations there's clearly a self fulfilling prophecy going on, but when it comes to the external world, the predictions come out pretty accurate.
> One thing this really highlights to me is how often the "boring" takes end up being the most accurate.
Would the commenter above mind sharing the method behind of their generalization? Many people would spot check maybe five items -- which is enough for our brains to start to guess at potential patterns -- and stop there.
On HN, when I see a generalization, one of my mental checklist items is to ask "what is this generalization based on?" and "If I were to look at the problem with fresh eyes, what would I conclude?".
If an LLM were acting as a kind of historian revisiting today’s debates with future context, I’d bet it would see the same pattern again and again: the sober, incremental claims quietly hold up, while the hyperconfident ones collapse.
Something like "Lithium-ion battery pack prices fall to $108/kWh" is classic cost-curve progress. Boring, steady, and historically extremely reliable over long horizons. Probably one of the most likely headlines today to age correctly, even if it gets little attention.
On the flip side, stuff like "New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care" feels like high-risk framing. Benchmarks rotate constantly, and “struggle” headlines almost always age badly as models jump whole generations.
I bet theres many "boring but right" takes we overlook today and I wondr if there's a practical way to surface them before hindsight does